


removables

by IrisParry



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-05
Updated: 2014-10-05
Packaged: 2018-02-18 03:31:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2333672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IrisParry/pseuds/IrisParry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You know that they take things, things you no longer need. Sometimes there are echoes, of shots and silence and sad, resigned smiles, reverberating from the things in front of you. You do not know how many missions there have been, but you know that you completed them. Your hands remember how. You know without knowing why, without <em>lacking</em> the why, or at least you did.</p><p>Then they didn't take <em>him</em>, and the why is a bright, formless agony.</p>
            </blockquote>





	removables

**Author's Note:**

> The usual Winter Soldier warnings about trauma and memory and violence and a bit of Stockholm syndrome apply in spades here. Brief allusion to self-harm, in the form of punching a wall. I think (hope) this has more of an impact if you don't know the prompt, but it is in the end notes. Thanks to [Milla](http://snoflingaprinsessa.tumblr.com) for the read through.

You know they do it. Take things. You don't know if you're supposed to know. Sometimes you feel the edge of something, its shape, like running your tongue along your teeth. Sometimes you are at the edge of something, empty space yawning in front of you, and you feel like falling. Sometimes you bite down and hit the ground. Blue light, the sour taste of rubber, a spike like the sense of an injury, your chest heaving - and you wake on a plain again.

You know that they take things, things you no longer need. Sometimes there are echoes, of shots and silence and sad, resigned smiles, reverberating from the things in front of you. You do not know how many missions there have been, but you know that you completed them. Your hands remember how. You know without knowing why, without _lacking_ the why, or at least you did.

Then they didn't take _him_ , and the why is a bright, formless agony.

You were supposed to know his strength and speed, that he favoured his right side but was just as much of a threat with the left. You were supposed to know that he was reluctant to cause you any serious damage. That he would hesitate. The rest - you cannot fathom its purpose, or its source. He fought you and lived, but he left you with things that you could not have learned from his fists or his feet or your hand at his throat. He dragged you to the edge of something, and now you look down at lights, movement, life. A distant, crawling city where there should be desert.

You feel like falling, and that never ends well.

You wait at the extraction point, knees drawn up, back against the wall. You ... ache. Nothing is broken, nothing else will last. Clean white lines streak your skin, fading there like old photographs as the square of sunlight sails across bare floorboards. You wait, but they don't come.

Nothing should last, but he stays, the shadow afterimage of a light you looked right into. His face blurs your eyes and his hands are on your shoulders, and your hands remember how, you _know_ this -

This rush of heat in your chest: something fortifying and right, like a connecting blow. You know it but not in the way you know a target's movements, a weapon's specifications. It's sprawling and messy, and they should have taken these things you don't need.

You do not need this ease in your muscles, as the sun soaks into them where you sit. The gentle warmth of the brick at your back. You have it anyway. You have a scattering of these, of echoes, single moments in time, discrete and simple and nothing but themselves. What you have of him, though, it pulls at you, reaches across your jagged edges, tries to knit them together like a wound.

You follow protocol. You wait, wait a long time, and you do not need sleep either but something in your mind drifts loose of its moorings and you see him again, clearer and closer. He is breathless and his hair is soaked dark and he looks at you like he can't believe you're real. Like at the bridge and nothing like at the bridge. There is a violence in you that is neither cold nor efficient, that pours from your hands where they are pressed to him because you need him to _know_ , need him to feel it -

You know they take things, but when you open your eyes this time you feel like you have _lost_ things.

Your hands are shaking, and you hold them to the sides of your face. Pressure at your temples. Darkness behind your eyes. Bite down. Hit the ground.

  
  
They will come for you. You do not quite know how to doubt it, even though the primary objective -

_one more time -_

_the freedom it deserves -_

_prep him -_

_32557 -_

When you return, it will be - you know without seeing, know without knowing why, and your muscles remember and they curl you in on yourself as if that will help anything. You failed, and they will come for you and -

_32557 -_

_32557 -_

_it's me, it's -_

_please don't make me do this -_

_finish it -_

\- and they will take it. They will take it all.

 

You wake up sunk in snow, white and blinding, but you're on fire, burned out from inside with pain that stuns the breath from you, and you can't -

 

You wake up tangled in his body and his bedsheets, in the rising sunlight, in amber.

 

You wake up drenched in terror, on your feet and firing on instinct, ghost of his arm around your throat, and you watch him stumble and fall.

 

You wake up suddenly certain that you will die here, in the mud thousands of miles from home.

 

You fall asleep and you don't mean to, because it's Sunday morning, but you feel heavy and sated and he's drowsing gently, his skin tacky beneath your palms, breath soft and slowing against your chest, and you can't...

 

You wake up with your back pressed to wet leather and six guns trained on you and you knew him and your mouth tastes sour and coppery and you knew him but you can't -

 

It rains on the third day, heavy and spiteful, like the sky just couldn't keep it in anymore. It lashes at the window, rattles the frame, takes everything out on the earth. Your muscles ache for movement, or for the absolute stillness that only comes with -

You keep walking, back and forward across the bare room. You see him when you sleep, so you do not sit down and risk sleep again.

You see him now anyway, hear his voice. You remember him when he was small and people thought he could not be strong, and when he was bigger and you thought he could never be weak enough to come back to you. You remember that you did not always need help to bury things, to burn out empty spaces in your mind.

There is newly scorched ground that all your thoughts are cringing from. You can feel the edges of it, its shape, the warning heat.

 

You wake up on the floor of the safe house and there is blood on your knuckles, streaked down the wall, blood on your knuckles but none of it is his, not anymore. You were at the edge of something and now you're falling, hitting every rock on the way down.

Sweat is cooling on your skin, and still the beat of your heart rocks your whole body. Your dreams were thunderclaps that shook the ground beneath your feet, lightning flashes of perfect clarity that took your breath away.

He was matching you, at the bridge, keeping up, pushing you back and knocking you down, and something wild rose in your throat and sang in your veins. You do not carry scars but your body remembers; your body remembered, crashing against his, remembered the desperate thrill of fear, something beyond pain that meant you dared not stop, something that zeroed in on him again and again. You killed people and you cared about it, once, but you did it for him, tamping down that terror with a cold, hard certainty that you would not, could not fail. It all swept back through you with the adrenaline, when you turned your fists and your knives on him -

You cannot remember any other fights like that. Of course, you cannot remember any other fights, not really, but there are the echoes, flashes - some reference point, something that means your hands and your mind know how. Fighting him, you knew how to fear - not failure, not the chair -

_32557 -_

_not without you -_

\- at the bridge, you knew how to fear death again, your own and - and his, and now it floods over you again and leaves you reeling. Your heart is in your throat and you roll over onto your front, bracing yourself on your arms while horror kicks at your stomach with steel-cap boots. You could have finished it. You both could have.

_I'm not gonna fight you._

No. That's not how it -

_You're my -_

No.

The memory is a rush of vicious heat that makes spots dance in front of your eyes, and your arms shake while you retch pointlessly, body rebelling.

_All you gotta do is shine my shoes, maybe take out the trash -_

You pull in a shuddering gasp as you fall onto your side.

_You're my friend -_

He dropped his shield, and he just stood there, just lies there, gives up, and nothing fits, everything about this is wrong, everything -

_I can get by on my own._

You reach out to him and -

_You don't have to -_

_Then finish it -_

Bite down. Hit the ground. End of the -

 

_Your name is -_

His name is Steven Grant Rogers, and you've known him your whole life. You don't know why they didn't take all this, because you are sure you were never built to contain it.

It occurs to you, now, that maybe they _did_ take him, but he just kept walking right back in like he owned the place, like always.

 _Always._ There's an idea. You laugh, the sound scraping free of your throat, something loosening in your chest. You laugh, and you know this is not something you were supposed to keep. And you know that you have to go.

 

There should be better security - hell, _any_ security.

You should not have been able to get in so easily. The fear clenches in your gut, tighter as you walk along the hall, and when you see the door is open, darkness within, you have to stop and catch your breath.

You know there is nobody here. Your shallow breaths and your racing heart are deafening in the absolute silence. You know there is nobody here, but you keep walking until you see -

The chair is the still point in the chaos of the room, a monolith in a sea of scattered papers, smashed glass, wires, dozens of empty drawers and the holes they left in the walls. Someone left in a hurry.

You are on your knees before you know you are falling, bile in your throat, legs still scrabbling in panic beneath you until your back is against the wall. Nowhere left to go. You squeeze your eyes closed, push your fists against them, but all you see is Steve's face, bloody and ruined. What comes next is a blur of colour and pressure and dull, wet cracking sounds. You think he falls. You think you scream. You do not know how you survived this - how you will survive this.

You wake up in the vault, on the floor, alone. You wait, wait a long time, but they don't come. They don't take it. But they have to. They have to _take it_ -

_32557 -_

_32557 -_

_end of the line -_

**Author's Note:**

> The prompt, from [butourwinter](http://butourwinter.tumblr.com), was that Bucky beat Steve to death on the helicarrier and later remembered who he'd killed. WOW, THANK YOU FRIEND. I couldn't bring myself to really do it though (just like Bucky, god we're like soulmates or something I swear), so I kinda handwaved it instead. This fic was heavily influenced by Sebastian Stan's comment that the Winter Soldier's mind is "everywhere."


End file.
